From Kevin Durant to Trae Young to Giannis Antetokounmpo to Luka Doncic, the NBA is being decimated by the Omicron variant of COVID-19. As of this article, the variant has sidelined dozens and dozens of players that have thrown teams, the league, and its schedule into chaos.

Replacement players are getting a chance to play and already logging significant minutes, making the best NBA prop bets at leading sportsbooks fluctuate wildly – and there’re a lot of NBA players that are still unvaccinated. So yeah, Adam Silver is having a busier-than-usual season.

What are the NBA’s health and safety protocols?

As you’re well aware, the COVID-19 pandemic is mutating and still very much a problem. So the league established a strategy that placed rules on managing and dealing with players and staff being exposed to COVID-19 or testing positive.

Before the 2021-22 season started, NBA teams received guidance from the league on how they would respond when or if personnel were impacted by COVID-19. Called health-and-safety protocols, these guidelines detailed how a team should manage testing, exposure and positive results. We won’t re-publish every document.

We reviewed the league’s Health and Safety guidelines (as well as the outlines tentatively released in September 2021 obtained by the AP) and highlighted some of the key health-and-safety protocols. Here’s some of the core principles, restrictions, provisions, and permissible exceptions for both vaccinated and unvaccinated NBA players that most affect the league.

• Anyone who tests positive will have two routes to return to work: go 10 days or more after the first positive test or onset of symptoms, or test negative twice at least 24 hours apart via PCR testing.
• Any player who tests positive, even if asymptomatic, will not be allowed to exercise for a minimum of 10 days and then must be monitored in individual workouts for an additional two days.
• There are no criteria mentioned for what might prompt the NBA to suspend the season.
• Unvaccinated players are required to remain at their residence when in their home market.
• Unvaccinated players are not be permitted to visit “higher-risk settings” such as restaurants, bars, clubs, entertainment venues and large indoor gatherings.
• Team traveling parties will be limited to 45 people, including 17 players, as they make their way around the country to play a home-and-road schedule in NBA arenas.
• As in the Orlando bubble, an anonymous tip line will be made available to report possible violations of safety protocols.

When a player tests positive for COVID-19, that player must quarantine for ten days from the first positive result and “at least 24 hours must have passed since a fever broke.” In order to come back to work, that player (or staff member) must test negative twice on a PCR test, and those samples must be at least 24 hours apart.

Even though COVID-19 has decimated the league, they’ve come prepared. The Health-and-Safety protocols established what would happen in a worst-case scenario. In the document, the league says that the season would not be suspended or canceled because of  “independent cases (not spread among players or staff), or a small or “expected number” of COVID-19 cases.”

Adam Silver spoke with Malika Andrews on ESPN’s NBA Today.

Andrews: We’re seeing a spike in COVID-19 cases around the world but we’re also seeing it in the NBA with upwards of 80 players testing into the COVID protocols with Christmas Day rapidly approaching. Are there any plans right now to stop or pause the season to allow for the spread to slow?

Silver: No plans right now to pause the season. We’ve of course looked at all the options, but frankly, we’re having trouble coming up with what the logic would be behind pausing right now as we look through these cases literally ripping through the country right now putting aside the rest of the world. I think we’re finding ourselves we knew we were going to get to and that this virus will not be eradicated and we’re going to have to learn to live with it and that’s what we’re experiencing in the league now.

Does that mean the season won’t be canceled? Not at all. It just goes to show that the NBA has been thinking ahead, is prepared, but also being flexible and adjusting as the pandemic changes. And as the disease mutates so will the rules be adjusted. Sounds like the NBA (and the world as a whole) is going to be dealing with COVID-19 for the immediate future.